4 years in, augmented reality in smartphones has yet to catch on

Four years have passed since augmented reality (AR) apps for smartphones started appearing in app stores for consumer use, but the trend has been slow to catch on.

While military AR applications for pilots and soldiers have been around for years, AR apps are just now expanding to other work-related areas. One example is fighting fires, where a helmet-mounted display provides a building schematic to indicate where gas lines or people might be located.

"We didn't see AR hit the mainstream until location-based services got big three or four years ago, so you point your phone up at Big Ben and get added information," said Gartner analyst Tuong Nguyen. "While the military has been using AR for a long time, now we all have devices in our pockets which have made AR accessible to the mass market."

Even so, the mass market for AR apps is still so new that Gartner and other research firms haven't precisely measured its size or financial impact.

"Even though AR is quite prolific for consumers and we've seen a lot of it in the last three years, in terms of AR picking up and engaging consumers, that hasn't happened," Nguyen said.

"There are just so many bad examples of it," Nguyen added. "Let's say I see an ad in a magazine and say, 'Hey, this is AR-enabled' and so I pull out my phone to point at the ad and something comes up, like an animation or a Web site. But I'll say, "OK, that's interesting, but I could have done it at home on my big screen and all you are offering me is the same thing on a smaller screen that costs me data use, so I'm not likely to do that again.'"

There are some interesting consumer AR campaigns, but they are trickling out slowly, Nguyen said. "There are so many solution providers with bad AR campaigns that it's turning people off to AR and giving it a bad name."

Carolina Milanesi, chief of research at Kantar WorldPanel Comtech, agreed that AR hasn't been successful with consumers, partly because so many of the app experiences are "quite gimmicky" and not always easy to use. What's needed is a way to make the AR experiences more relevant and engaging to users, she said.

"AR is very hard to do well," added Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates. "Even small errors in AR cause major issues, and users perceive the lack of coordination or quality."

Conde Nast Traveler was one of the first to use a simple version of AR with its app guides for four popular tourist cities, while Nokia in 2013 upgraded its location-based AR features in the Lumia 1020. With the app, a user can point the Lumia smartphone to a city street scene to see names of shops appear above certain buildings in the display.

One of the more successful recent uses of AR, in Nguyen's opinion, uses the Ikea home furnishing catalog that debuted last year. With Ikea's AR app, a user at home points a smartphone or tablet at an item in the catalog to see on the device's display a couch, chair or table within that user's living space, as shown in this video. For its catalog app, Ikea relied on AR-provider Metaio, which boasts Macy's, Audi and McDonald's among its clients.

With the Ikea augmented reality app, a user points a smartphone at an item in the catalog, such as this round table, and can see the item on the smartphone in the user's living space. (Image: Screengrab of Ikea video)

Other AR approaches for use with handheld devices are also emerging. Seacoast Media Group, a regional newspaper chain in the Northeast, plans to launch in June a free AR app for Android and iOS smartphones and tablets called SMG Shine.

A photo, headline or ad in one of SMG's six print newspapers could act as a trigger to launch a streaming video or other content, according to Colin Smith, digital marketing specialist for SMG.

"You might hold your phone or tablet over a picture of a high school basketball player taking a jump shot and get to see the rest of the play and other game highlights," Smith said. "From an advertising standpoint, if you see a picture or a listing of a house in a real estate ad that catches your attention, you could 'shine' a tour of the house immediately, rather than looking up the website or calling to hear information."

Smith said he understands how some users might want to avoid an AR app that promotes ads, but said the "strength of the idea is that it promotes user-engaging advertisements. Users hate advertisements that don't deliver content ,and this app sets up a platform for that content to be delivered in an entertaining way."

User-driven engagement is more important than ever in advertising and marketing, Smith said. "The movement happening in content marketing, whether digital or not, is user-driven," he said. "We are doing this for users, not advertisers. The app obviously requires success from an advertising standpoint, but we are far more excited at the prospect of having users of the app feel more connected to both our printed materials as well as local companies in general. My goal is to make the experiences richer. It's not a trap at all, just technology making an experience deeper."

There's little doubt that AR apps will be used with Google Glass and other emerging wearables, although its value might take years to be fully realized, analysts said.

"AR hasn't been that successful yet because it is still looking for that killer 'must have' application," said Rob Enderle, an analyst at Enderle Group. "It remains more of a science experiment now."

Gold said AR "isn't ready for prime time yet, certainly not with current smartphone tech" and only in beta for headsets and glasses. "It will likely be several years before AR is consumer grade and ready for mass deployment."

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